Featuring works by internationally renowned contemporary Tibetan artists alongside rare historical pieces, this exhibition highlights the ways these artists explore the infinite possibilities of visual forms to reflect their transcultural, multilingual, and translocal lives. Though living and working in different geographical areasLhasa, Dharamsala, Kathmandu, New York, and the Bay Areathe... More >

BAMPFA's Japanese art collection began in 1919 with a remarkable donation of more than a thousand woodblock prints from the estate of UC Berkeley Professor of English William Dallam Armes. This exhibition features a selection of these exceptional prints, as well as hanging scroll paintings, screens, lacquerware, and ceramics that have entered the collection over the century since this... More >

Masako Miki was born in Japan but has made the Bay Area, and Berkeley in particular, her home for more than twenty years. In her work she remains close to her ancestral traditions, especially those that arise from her association with Buddhist and Shinto beliefs and practices, as well as traditional Japanese folklore. Her current work, she says, is inspired by the idea of animism from the Shinto... More >

Bringing together nearly seventy works spanning the entirety of the artists career, this exhibition presents a fresh and eye-opening examination of Hans Hofmanns prolific and innovative artistic practice. Featuring paintings and works on paper from 1930 through the end of Hofmanns life in 1966, the exhibition includes numerous masterworks from BAMPFAs distinguished collection as well as many... More >

You don't have to be a pro to know that math and science can help improve your game. In our exhibit, Well Played!, you can experiment with force, angles, and trajectory to get the highest scores you can with classic arcade games such as Skeeball, Pinball, and Basketball.

Want to improve your score? Try our interactive exhibits on the math and science behind force and trajectory, and then head... More >

This exhibition of artists' books centers on ideas about the built environment and has been curated by Berkeley-based book artist Julie Chen for UC Berkeleys Environmental Design Library. Featuring works by 25 artists including Robbin Ami Silverberg, Clifton Meador, Inge Bruggeman, Karen Kunc, Sarah Bryant and Barbara Tetenbaum, the exhibition explores the built environment through text, image,... More >

Fabien Cappellos SILLAS CALLEJERAS (STREET CHAIRS, 2018) offers lessons in design and ingenuity from Mexico City. The photographic series depicts a collection of chairs assembled from everyday contexts across the sprawling metropolis  market stalls, shops, street stands, and elsewhere. Cappello casts an anthropological eye on artifacts that reflect a city where artisanal manufacture... More >

In the pantheon of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century artists who represent Mexico and Mexican art, the artwork of José Guadalupe Posada stands out as a bright constellation that continues to shine a light on important stories through woodcuts, imprints, and engravings. This exhibition was created using the books from the collections of the Doe Library. The exhibition is envisioned... More >

Educated in physics, mathematics, and philosophy at Princeton University and trained in graphic design at Yale, Berkeley-based Aaron Marcus explores new possibilities for expression. He created his first computer-assisted poem-drawings in the spring of 1972, when he served as a research associate at Yale Universitys School of Art and Architecture. Using standard typographical symbols, Marcus... More >

If you sip a cup of coffee, are you on drugs? If you try psychedelics, are you committing a crime? If you have a sweet tooth, are you a sugar addict?

Since the beginning of human existence, peoples of the world have altered their minds with countless plant-based substances. They have done so for many reasons, ranging from pleasure to health to ceremony, with effects both harmful and benign,... More >

In this new commission for the BAMPFA Art Wall, entitled Ghost Demonstration, Amorales draws from the multiple histories of mural art in Mexico, the political demonstrations that occurred in Berkeley in the 1960s (as well as more recent events), and protests in the United Kingdom in the 1980s. In order to make this monumental mural, the artist used stencils of slogans from Berkeley protest... More >

This exhibition celebrates a major gift of photography, donated over a period of several years, from Berkeley collectors William Goodman and Victoria Belco in memory of their daughter Teresa Goodman. While the exhibition features some historical photographs, such as pictures by the early twentieth-century French photographer Jacques-Henri Lartigue (most of whose work was made between the ages of... More >

Notions of resistance, alongside fears and realities of oppression, resound throughout Jewish history. As a minority, Jews express their political aspirations, ideals of heroism, and yearnings of retaliation and redemption in their rituals, art, and everyday life.

Centering on coins in The Magnes Collection, this exhibition explores how... More >

For nearly two decades, Yaakov (Jacob) Benor-Kalter (1897-1969) traversed the Old City of Jerusalem, documenting renowned historical monuments, ambiguous subjects in familiar alleyways, and scores of new Jews building a new homeland. Benor-Kalters photographs smoothly oscillate between two worlds, and two Holy Lands, with one lens.

Acquired by The Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life in 2017 thanks to an unprecedented gift from Taube Philanthropies, the most significant collection of works by Arthur Szyk (Łódź, Poland, 1894  New Canaan, Connecticut, 1951) is now available to the world in a public institution for the first time as... More >

The First World War (1914-1918) uprooted millions across Europe, and beyond. Many Jews left Eastern and Southern Europe, bringing with them prized personal and communal belongings. In an attempt to rescue precious heritage from imminent destruction, these memory objects often ended up with museums, collectors, and art dealers in the West.

Fifteen years ago this April, photographs taken inside the Iraqi prison at Abu Ghraib became public in what amounted to a shocking disclosure of torture perpetrated by United States military intelligence officers against Iraqi detainees. They pictured prisoners stripped naked, hooded, and threatened by dogs, their dehumanization made more ghastly by American guards appearing casually next to... More >

Born in Salt Lake City in 1919, Frederick Hammersley moved to the Bay Area at a young age and first studied art in San Francisco. Stationed in Paris during World War II, he took the opportunity to meet Pablo Picasso and Constantin Brancusi, as well as study at the École des Beaux Arts. Upon returning to the United States, Hammersley enrolled in the Chouinard Art Institute (which became the... More >